


If You Got the Time

by Barkour



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: F/M, Romantic Comedy, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-24 19:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2593883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Well, how was Kanan supposed to know a Twi'lek's head tails were so sensitive? Or: five times Kanan touched Hera's lekku.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Got the Time

**Author's Note:**

> Just a bunch of short, light-hearted, goofy romcom fics. There will be five 'chapters' to this, none of which will be terribly long or terribly deep. Chapter 'titles' will be the rough timeline. I'll add characters as they appear, and yeah, the rating will _probably_ be going up.
> 
> The title is from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' "Do You Wanna Touch Me" ([Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DRCjQNFyQw)) and the premise is courtesy of my buddy and yours, the infamous real life Dipper Pines: Zumie. Zooms, you are a hero, a legend, and a true friend.

The turbo lift jolted. The lights flickered, steadied; then they popped and the power went out entirely. Even the back-lit panel of buttons was dark.

Someone on the lift said, “What’s happening?”

“Is it going to fall?”

Hera—who’d worn a maintenance worker’s rig onto the lift—huffed beside Kanan.

“Don’t worry,” Kanan said. He nudged Hera. “These things are—what is it, honey? Back-coded?”

“They’re specifically programmed to lock into place in the event of a power shut-off.”

“There,” said Kanan. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Hey, can you fix it?”

“Me?” 

He felt Hera shifting. He’d a certain acute awareness of her, an attunement to the specifics of her body heat, her weight, each precise movement she made. No matter the dark: Hera pressed her fingers to her breast. Her chin tucked. Ever the committed actor.

“I’m as in the dark as you all are. I’m a flight tech, not a turbo lift doorman.”

“Easy, honey.”

“Don’t ‘honey’ me,” she whispered sidelong at him.

“Look—”

“Where?”

“There’s a comm. button by the door,” Kanan said patiently. “Somebody find it and let security know the lift’s jammed.”

“And fast,” Hera added as the people towards the front of the lift began to move, making way for whatever intrepid sucker had decided to notify security. “I’ve only got ten minutes left on my break, ‘honey.’”

Kanan leaned in close, closer perhaps than was necessary. He murmured, “And we’ll make every one of them count,” and ghosted his hand along her back.

“Don’t get cheeky.” 

She flicked his hip with a finger. A light touch, this. Only rarely did Hera go without her usual thick gloves. Kanan rolled his weight to his far hip.

The comm. burst with static. 

“What is it? We’re a little busy—”

“The lift’s jammed. We don’t have power, and—”

“None of the lifts are off-line,” their savior snapped. “This channel’s for emergencies only, and we’ve got our hands full dealing with—”

“Dealing with what?”

“Is something happening?”

“What if the power’s out on purpose?”

“Oh—here,” he grumbled, “I’ll hit your lights. Maybe the signals are crossed again…”

Kanan braced in the corner. Arms out, hands tight on the rails, his legs spread and feet planted. Hera turned in the darkness to face him. She gripped the rail to either side of his hips and whispered, “Here we go.”

“We’ve been going,” Kanan teased her softly. 

Then the lift—in accordance with the bug they’d planted in the system—plummeted. He let go of the rail on his right to sling his arm around Hera’s waist. The screams were sudden, encompassing; the cacophony echoed within the closed space and then, as the lift reversed as sharply as it had fallen, stopped.

Easier, with his arm about her, to mitigate the jostling Hera received. The force had always been a blunt instrument for Kanan; now he used it to blunt the trauma of violent motion. Hera tucked her face briefly to his chest. Her breath—caught by her teeth as she set them—warmed his breast through his thin and nondescript shirt. The weight of her lekku fell to her shoulders. He could very easily imagine her lips, parted, as easily as he could—in the complete void of light—distinguish her teeth against his chest.

The lift braked. The lights flickered on again. V-220-3-A, read the digital screen above the door: a restricted flight hangar, normally outside the destination list available to publicly accessible lifts. The bug ought to have seeded through the system in such a way that it would appear to originate at the desk of the man who had hit the button to test the lights. 

Hera let go of the left rail but still held to the right. With the back of her hand to her brow, she closed her eyes a moment and breathed. 

His hand rose. One of her lekku had fallen before her shoulder. Absently he tucked his fingers in the loop her lekku made and swept it behind her shoulder. The skin there was sleek, very smooth, and the lekku as he brushed it jiggled. His thumb stroked the curve of it, near to her capped head.

Hera’s breath had caught. The brim of her workman’s cap masked her eyes; they were too close yet.

“Hera. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. 

She stepped away from him, over the prone bodies of their compatriots in minor inconvenience. The door had opened on to the hangar. Kanan picked his way over the bodies, too. No dead. He would have felt that. What he did feel was something in Hera—a fleeting thing, hot—swiftly crushed.

“Hey,” he said, “if you’re hurt—” He reached to touch her shoulder.

Hera whirled. Her lekku bobbed. His fingers stuttered in the air, short of her. She was smiling, one of her tattooed eyebrows quirked in the shadow of the cap. 

“If I were hurt,” she said, “you’d know, wouldn’t you? Put your cap and badge on. That show Zeb’s putting on with security is only going to last so long. The last thing we need is a patrol asking what a perfectly normal flight engineer—” Here she brushed at her chest again. “—is doing with a civilian.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “These badges better work.” 

He peeled the friction-nullifier off and slapped the badge to his shirt front. The friction adhesive locked to the cloth. 

“Of course they’ll work,” Hera said. “You scanned the images.”

“And we all know how right I am about everything.”

They moved quickly up the corridor, his cap set crooked while hers sat neatly. It had to: the holes for her lekku allowed for no insouciant angles. Hera preceded him. The twin head tails rolled with her steps, a faint but profound shivering at her scalp that translated into a rhythmic sway at the tips. 

Kanan rounded his eyes; as he did so, he rolled them. Lekku fetishes were the first sign of an imperial class scumbag, the kind of Hutt-spit trash that paid to see Twi’lek dancing girls writhe against each other. 

His own stomach was half-knotted from that joy ride. Likely he hadn’t done enough to envelop Hera safely. He worked his cheek. That apology could come later. She’d laugh at him for making it. 

At the end of the corridor, where it dead-ended in a perpendicular corridor, they split: Hera to the left corner and Kanan to the right. He checked his branch with the mirror on his chrono. 

“See you in ten,” he whispered.

Hera arched her brow and smiled sweetly, as if she had a joke. “Good luck.”

“Don’t push yours.”

She wiggled her nose at him and there they parted. Proof of experimental new fighters was always valuable information; the plans for such even more so. Kanan had the recorder and Hera the technical know-how. He got the proof, she got the plans, Zeb got to bust a few heads, and Chopper got to complain about whatever he complained about when they met at the rendezvous point.

“I know,” Hera said to Chopper, “but you’re an old model. They don’t use astromechs like you at this station.”

Affronted, Chopper spurted invective then rolled off in a huff.

“Oh, and what would you have done if they did spot you?” Hera called after Chopper. “Zap them?”

“Fat lot of good zapping will do you,” Zeb laughed. “Maybe on a kid—oi! Watch it! Oi!”

“Chop,” said Kanan, “stop electrocuting Zeb.”

“Just one hour of peace,” Hera yelled. “Well?”

Kanan looked up from the data tablet to find Hera watching him expectantly.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Chop’s your droid,” said Kanan, “not mine. He doesn’t listen to me.”

“Why don’t you try?” she suggested. “I’m the contact so I have to send the data packet to Fulcrum.” 

She snagged the tablet out of his hands and brushed by Kanan to perch on the far end of the couch. He at the left, she at the right. So they’d reversed. He rested his arm along the back of the couch and studied her. Her fingers—still bare—flickered over the screen.

Idly Hera glanced at him; then her gaze returned to Kanan.

“What?”

She had very long fingers with knobby joints. Her nails were plain, unpainted, and clipped short.

“You sure you’re all right?”

Hera winched her mouth to the side. “Kanan—please. I’m a big girl.”

“I know,” he said mildly. Then he gestured to his jaw, mimed sweeping hair over his shoulder.

Hera touched her own shoulder. Her fingers grazed the tapering end of her lekku. Her hand stilled. So too did her expression. Her eyes were lidded. She looked at Kanan.

Hesitant, she lifted the lekku and dropped it behind her. Her eyes darted. Kanan tipped his head and continued to study her.

Zeb swore, at the end of the long corridor. She looked away, to the tablet again. Her fingers twitched.

“Would you mind?” Hera asked Kanan. 

Sighing, he rolled his head and, with his shoulders, pushed off the couch. “Sure. But only because you asked me so nicely.”

“Thank you, Kanan,” Hera said, with that smile like honey in her low voice. 

It was a good thing he knew where they stood, or he might have taken all the wrong things from that.


End file.
